The first assassination attempt of 28 June 1914 was a flop. As Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, motored along Sarajevo's Appel Quay in an open Gräf & Stift limousine, a young Bosnian Serb named Nedeljko Čabrinović hurled a bomb at the car. It bounced off the folded-back canopy and exploded under the following vehicle, wounding around twenty people. Čabrinović swallowed his cyanide capsule and leapt into the River Miljacka — but the poison was old and merely made him retch, and the summer river was only inches deep. He was dragged out and beaten. The Archduke, unhurt, insisted on continuing to the town hall, where he interrupted the mayor's oblivious speech of welcome: he had come to Sarajevo on a visit, he objected furiously, and been greeted with bombs.
The date was provocation layered on provocation. It was St Vitus's Day, Vidovdan — the anniversary of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, the holiest date in Serb national memory — and Bosnia had been formally annexed by Austria-Hungary only six years earlier. Waiting along the quay that morning were seven trained-up conspirators of the Young Bosnia movement, armed with pistols and bombs supplied through the Black Hand, a secret society run by Serbian military intelligence officers around Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, known as Apis. For Franz Ferdinand the trip had a private sweetener: his beloved wife Sophie, whose lesser birth made their marriage morganatic, was barred from sharing his honours in Vienna — she could not even sit beside him at official functions. In Sarajevo, where he came in his military capacity, she could ride at his side. It was, near enough, their fourteenth wedding anniversary.
Five minutes and a delicatessen
After the town hall, the Archduke asked to visit the bomb's victims in hospital. To avoid the crowded city centre, the route was changed: the motorcade would run straight back along the Appel Quay. But in the confusion nobody properly briefed the drivers. The lead cars turned right into Franz Joseph Street as originally planned, and the Archduke's chauffeur, Leopold Lojka, followed. Governor Potiorek barked that he was going the wrong way; Lojka braked and stopped to reverse — directly outside Moritz Schiller's delicatessen, where nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip, having assumed the plot had failed, happened to be standing. (The often-repeated detail that he was eating a sandwich is a modern embellishment with no contemporary evidence — the delicatessen is real, the sandwich is not.) Princip stepped forward and fired twice with a Browning FN Model 1910 pistol from little more than a metre. The first bullet struck Sophie in the abdomen; the second hit Franz Ferdinand in the neck. "Sophie, Sophie, don't die — stay alive for our children," he pleaded. Both were dead within the hour.
Princip swallowed his own useless cyanide, was seized by the crowd, and survived. Under Habsburg law the death penalty could not be applied to anyone under twenty at the time of the crime, and Princip was nineteen by weeks; he was sentenced instead to twenty years and died of skeletal tuberculosis in the Terezín fortress prison in April 1918, wasted and largely forgotten, months before the war he had ignited ended.
The month that ended four empires
Vienna, convinced of Belgrade's complicity, obtained Germany's unconditional backing — the notorious "blank cheque" — and on 23 July delivered an ultimatum designed to be refused. Serbia accepted nearly all of it; Austria-Hungary declared war anyway on 28 July, exactly one month after the shots. The alliance machinery then engaged with terrible smoothness: Russia mobilised for Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia and France, marched through Belgium, and brought in Britain on 4 August. Four years later, all four of the great dynastic empires entangled in the crisis — Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanov and Ottoman — had ceased to exist, and perhaps twenty million people were dead. History added its own eerie footnotes: the treaty formally ending the war with Germany was signed at Versailles on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the murders, and the death car — its registration plate A III 118 later noted as an uncanny anagram of the Armistice date, 11-11-18 — sits today with the Archduke's bloodstained tunic in Vienna's Museum of Military History. Rarely has history balanced so much on so little: a botched bomb, a missed briefing, a stalled car, and a teenager standing on precisely the wrong corner of a city with an empire's future in his pocket.
Quiz nuggets
- Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were shot on 28 June 1914 — St Vitus's Day, anniversary of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo.
- The first attempt failed when Nedeljko Čabrinović's bomb bounced off the car's folded canopy and wounded people in the following vehicle.
- Gavrilo Princip fired a Browning FN Model 1910 after the Archduke's car stopped outside Moritz Schiller's delicatessen on Franz Joseph Street.
- Aged 19, Princip was too young for the death penalty; he died of tuberculosis in Terezín in April 1918.
- Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914; the Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the assassination.